Edison and His Inventions

The story that Mr. Edison has invented something by which a city could be destroyed, for instance, by an enemy thirty miles away, is, of course, an absurdity. The only interesting thing about it is that it is generally believed in Europe that Edison has perfected some such wholesale agent of destruction. He has received in the past two or three months a number of letters, some of them from people in authority, asking what there is in the report, and one of the letters contained an intimation that an European government might be disposed to treat with him for the exclusive possession of the secret.

Mr. Edison has told his friends about this experience, and has added that he has but one secret, and that is the operation of his ore extractor, a secret which he expects will yield him several millions of dollars.

Whether the fairy-like suggestion of his that an enemy might be destroyed by an electrically-charged volume of water played from a hose, or whether the report was due to the the suggestion that the discovery of Nikola Tesla might be utilized in war, so as to cast a lightning bolt into an enemy’s town or upon an enemy’s ship, Mr. Edison does not know, but he is inclined to think that the report can be traced to one of these two sources.